This thesis analyses the understanding of sex trafficking in the League of Nations as well as the ways in which the changing international environment influenced the image of sex trafficking in the...Show moreThis thesis analyses the understanding of sex trafficking in the League of Nations as well as the ways in which the changing international environment influenced the image of sex trafficking in the interwar years, with a focus on how the League collected data, how it interpreted data, but also how it misrepresented sex trafficking. I argue that a shift in the debates within the Advisory Committee on Traffic of Women and Children can be discerned. This committee started off with a focus on mobility, which shifted to abolition and regulation, and finally to prevention and punishment. These shifts were influenced by the immediate post-war environment, the increased role of the state and the economic crisis in 1929. The committee was faced with different challenges and tensions that shaped the knowledge that was produced about sex trafficking. The image of sex trafficking they created is still topical today. Rather than repeating this image, I will critically engage with it and point out how sex trafficking came to embody a variety of issues that were prevalent at that time, such as miscegenation, emancipation and nationalism. By treating this committee as an example of international cooperation, of data collection during the interwar years and of experts gaining a better understanding of a ‘global’ issue, I will add to lively historiographical debates about transnational history, the importance of the League of Nations and the historical study of gender.Show less
